Sunday, March 13, 2016

Six Months In

It’s been six whole months here, and you have yet to start your
own nonprofit, write a prize-winning documentary, or pen an incisive think piece
that makes it into the newsfeeds of all your Facebook friends.

Your victories are smaller. You know the names of the people
in your office. You’ve (almost) mastered public transportation. You start to dream
in your second language.

Absolutely nothing worthy of a bestselling memoir.

When they told you that international work is difficult,
that it can years of work to see change, you wrote it down neatly in your
notes, but it didn’t stick. You felt called to make a difference and sure that
you could do it.

Now you’re here, in the type of job you always dreamed
about. You feel lucky, you feel blessed, and sometimes you feel sick with guilt
that you aren’t enjoying this more.

You didn’t really
think it would be so hard.

Sure there are the moments you share with your friends and
family over Skype: victories and friendships and glimpses of the divine in late-night
prayer services, mountains, the kitchen when your host mom makes tortillas.

But after six months, the novelty of hand-washing clothes
and bucket showers becomes tedious. You miss your family, macaroni and cheese, clean
city parks and libraries, and knowing where to go to buy socks or hair
conditioner.

Community doesn’t come ready-made, you’re learning, cross-cultural
friendships can develop, but that they’re not always easy. You often find
yourself feeling lonely.

You realize that relating to the poor and marginalized in
another country is just as difficult as relating to the poor and marginalized
in your home country – and you didn’t always do a very good job at that.

You’re still coming to terms with your comparative wealth
and privilege, the language that you speak and the connections that you have,
your education: weighing all of these against poverty that you see daily but
feel helpless to change.

What you do seems like less than a drop in the bucket.

You trade messages with people working elsewhere, and they
all seem to have it figured out. Their lives seem more glamorous and exciting
than yours, they seem to have deeper and more meaningful connections with their
communities, while you still don’t know the name of the woman sells gum and
cigarettes on your street corner.

It’s been
six months.

This sometimes seems like an eternity, but it’s barely any
time at all. You are still stretching and adjusting to this new place.

You may have no publishable victories after just six months.
The documentary will have to wait. The nonprofit start-up may need to go back
to the drawing board. Because if a problem could be fixed in six months, it wouldn’t
be worth you working on it.

You’re not here to
save the world, you tell yourself. You’re not here because you’re a good
person, though maybe you’re here because you’re a faithful person. Maybe you’re
just here because you are a person,
and you understand that this humanness owes attention to other humans’ needs.

And that’s what this six months has been about.

Before you can solve poverty, you have to understand
poverty. Before you can love people transformationally, you have to know who
they really are. After six months, you don’t quite understand. You don’t quite
know. But you are closer. You listen better. Your humility has grown.

As you struggle with your identity when your humor and
intelligence are dampened by a foreign language, you know you will never again
judge anyone for an accent.

As you learn from brave and brilliant people who are
transforming their own countries, you know you will never again think of a
country’s people as helpless.

As you ask questions and make mistakes over and over again,
you are gifted with forgiveness just as many times. And you begin to see God’s
heart.

In these six months, you’ve been broken into pieces – from
fear, loneliness, helplessness, shame – you are stronger now, and braver, and humbler by far, even
if you haven’t really felt a change.

You’ve listened for six months, unable to speak.

You’ve followed for six months, not ready to lead.

You’ve set aside your own agenda – your insightful writing
or heart-tugging documentary or award-winning nonprofit – and become a small
part of what was already been happening before you came and what will continue
to happen after you leave.

1 comment:

Thanks so much for writing this!! I'm in Papua Indonesia and your blog spoke to my struggles and fears. I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one humbled by how little I can do (constantly confused by this culture/language) and how dependent I am on others to help me. Maybe there's meaning in the every-day challenges, but they're just not the challenges I expected.